Thunder, lightning, pouring rain; traffic, flooding and Blaisdell's perennially leaking roof — nothing, but nothing, could dampen the glory of Renée Fleming's voice.

Friday night offered possibly the worst weather imaginable for a voice, and especially for a light lyric voice: warm perfumed air, leaden with humidity, to start the phlegm flowing, alternating with cold air from air conditioners working overtime, drying out the vocal cords.

Nonetheless, Fleming never wavered: She sang beautifully and entertained the large audience between pieces with gentle, wry humor.

Throughout this visit, her first to Hawai'i, Fleming said, she has been amazed at the amount of rain coming down day after day after day. She wondered whether it was her fault and whether her audiences were going to start paying her to stay home.

Fortunately, the weather was mitigated by the warmth of her reception, and near the end of Friday's concert, Fleming reassured, "This is wonderful! I'm definitely going to come back ... when it's really sunny."

Dressed in sumptuous feathered gowns, walking with unhurried poise, Fleming was every inch the diva (goddess), wielding her vocal power and absolute control with apparent ease.

Fleming has a champagne voice with bell-like clarity and a vibrato so tight it shimmers. She sings from the softest of pianissimos to the loudest of fortissimos with seemingly effortless production, dropping weightlessly on to notes like a sparrow alighting on a wire.

Fleming's tessitura, her prevailing range, sits so high that midrange notes sound low, and even very, very high notes sound comfortably within her range, and yet her chest voice offers a surprising wealth of colors.

What astonishes is the bright resonance that blossoms as she moves into her head voice. Lyric voices are not known for their size, but Fleming's voice is so resonant that it can be heard easily over even a large orchestra, and when singing, Fleming seems not so much to be producing the sound as simply controlling its release.

Anyone who has ever tried to sing knows how staggeringly difficult it is to produce the quality of sound Fleming does so well. Unlike many, perhaps even most singers today, Fleming built a solid foundation for her voice and allowed it to develop at its own pace, so that it shifts smoothly between ranges in true "bel canto" style. No voice lasts forever, but even after years of singing on large stages, her voice has none of those ragged edges that emerge after a voice has been pushed.

Fleming presented a gala-style program displaying her breadth of mastery, from Mozart to Strauss to Broadway.

As fun as the Broadway arrangements were, as exciting as Mozart's "Allelujah" was, Friday's highlights all came from Fleming's specialty — the operatic arias.

Her "Poveri fiori" from Cilea's "Adriana Lecouvreur" was fabulous, especially that opening "swoop," and her debut of "Wie umgibst du mich mit Frieden" from Strauss' "Die Liebe der Danae" was meltingly beautiful.

There is, however, little point in discussing the pieces, as no one particularly cared what she sang, as long as she sang.

The audience came to hear Fleming, not Verdi et al, and Friday's audience seemed intent on making the most of the opportunity by repeatedly calling her back on stage, clamoring with their standing ovations for encore after encore.

Fleming graciously granted three before moving to the lobby to greet fans and sign recordings.

In his first time working with Fleming, maestro Samuel Wong returned to guest conduct the Honolulu Symphony, choosing instrumental interludes to complement Fleming's repertoire: a Mozart aperitif (the "Figaro" overture), a Strauss main course (the "Don Juan" tone poem) and a delightful Samuel Barber dessert (the overture to "The School for Scandal").

As usual, the symphony sounded wonderful under Wong, and soloists excelled: Paul Barrett (bassoon) and Scott Anderson (clarinet) were featured in almost every piece; Scott Janusch (oboe) had a great duet with Fleming in the Mozart and a gorgeous extended solo in the Strauss; Jason Sudduth (English horn) shone in the Barber; and Don Immel (trombone) shared the limelight with Fleming in Cole Porter's "So in Love" from "Kiss Me Kate."

Of course, the problem of accompanying a voice such as Fleming's is that, while it is nice to have the music, whenever Fleming was singing, no one paid much attention to the orchestra.